Lysis or Friendship

Lysis or Friendship

by Plato


Lysis is one of the socratic dialogues written by Plato and discusses the nature of friendship.


The main characters are Socrates, the boys Lysis and Menexenus who are friends, as well as Hippothales, who is in unrequited love with Lysis. Socrates proposes several possible notions regarding the true nature of friendship: Friendship between like and like; friendship between unlike and unlike; friendship between neither-good-nor-bad and good in the presence of evil.


In the end, Socrates discards all these ideas as wrong. While no definite conclusion is reached, it is suggested that the common pursuit of the "good and beautiful" (kalos kagathos) is the true motivation for friendship.


French aristocrat Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, who had fled Paris in the early 1900s after a homosexual scandal, named the house he built on Capri Villa Lysis after the title of this dialogue.